Learning a foreign language has been a universal quest for many. This quest is more prevalent and important today than ever before. As the global community becomes more interdependent, as international travel and commerce become more the norm, and as the world becomes more linked by the Internet, being able to communicate with people from other nations and cultures is becoming more of a necessity and less of a scholarly quest.
As an example, the English language has become the international language of business such that learning English has taken on prerequisite status in countries around the world. As another example, many individuals desire to learn a second language to satisfy personal or career goals.
The process of learning a foreign language includes a variety of approaches such as classroom instruction using face-to-face interaction and textual materials, flash cards, and self-instruction using media such as audio or video tapes. With the advent of personal computing, foreign language instructional software is readily available. However, the instructional software is typically transpositions of the previously and currently available approaches such as flash cards augmented with images or acoustics.
One traditional approach to language learning relates to a simple and effective method for learning a foreign language by reading literature in that language. However, the need to constantly refer to a dictionary often makes what should be an enjoyable experience tedious, thus discouraging the reader. One solution to this problem involves printing the foreign language text and its familiar language translation on opposing pages of a book so that quick reference may be had to the translation. However, the relatively extensive eye movement required to refer to the translation interrupts the reading of the foreign language text sufficiently to destroy the flow of the reading process.
Another approach to language learning relies on rote memorization or artificially crafted sentences to elicit word learning by random switching of words to create a fused sentence. Random switching of words, however, fails to consistently work well. First, the resultant mixed grammar of the fused sentence must obey syntactic constraints of both languages. Second, continuity of the text breaks if the words in the foreign language cannot be inferred from context easily.
Another approach to language learning is known as Language Immersion, which is used to randomly translate parts of text appearing on the Internet. According to Language Immersion, a user may select a desired level of translation according to novice, intermediate and fluent. Language Immersion, however, is not applicable to mediums other than text such as audio. Furthermore, Language Immersion is not very complex and fails to consider user feedback in order to customize the content presented to the user.
The currently available foreign language instructional approaches fail to utilize the skill of code-switching (also known as code-mixing) used by bilingual or multilingual individuals. Code-switching is the alternation between two or more languages in a single sentence. More specifically, code-switching is the use of more than one language in a manner consistent with the syntax and semantics of each language. Syntax refers language structure or the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed content such as sentences in a language. Semantics relates to the meaning of words and systematic organization of sounds in languages, or phonology.
The invention satisfies the need for an improved language learning approach by utilizing elements of code-switching to generate content from which a user can learn from context. The invention optimizes the content generated by considering the user's preferences and/or current proficiency level of the language to be learned.